COSMETIC SURGERY and the TELEVISUAL MAKEOVER a Foucauldian Feminist Reading

COSMETIC SURGERY AND THE TELEVISUAL MAKEOVER A Foucauldian feminist reading Cressida J. Heyes I argue that the televisual cosmetic surgical makeover is usefully understood as a contemporary manifestation of normalization, in Foucault’s sense—a process of defining a population in relation to its conformity or deviance from a norm, while simultaneously generating narratives of individual authenticity. Drawing on detailed analysis of “Extreme Makeover,” I suggest that the show erases its complicity with creating homogeneous bodies by representing cosmetic surgery as enabling of personal transformation through its narratives of intrinsic motivation and authentic becoming, and its deployment of fairy tale tropes. Introduction This essay aims to show how representations of cosmetic surgery have contributed to the evolution of a contemporary discourse in which one’s body must be made to represent one’s character. Within this discourse cosmetic surgery is not simply conceived as a technology that allows one to become more beautiful, or even achieve normalcy, but as a vehicle for self-transformation. This form of representation is becoming quite widespread across the different contexts in which cosmetic surgery is marketed, as other interpreters have suggested (e.g., Covino 2004; Fraser 2003a; Jones 2006), but it takes a particularly striking form in the recent genre of the televisual cosmetic surgical makeover. TV shows such as Extreme Makeover (US and UK editions), The Swan, Ten Years Younger, and numerous other more local versions, offer a scripted narrative of identity becoming in which the ordinary individual is aesthetically dramatically and rapidly transformed, while also making over her life and coming better to embody the virtuous person she allegedly truly is. The televisual makeover can be usefully interpreted, I argue, using the concept of normalization—that double and contradictory historical process Foucault describes by which developmental standards for populations are deployed to measure and enforce conformity at the same time as they generate modes of individuality.1 Normalization, on this view, both constrains (by compelling compliance with the norm) at the same time as it enables (by making certain forms of subjectivity possible), and, indeed, these two functions cannot be clearly separated. Both compliance and enablement are acted out, in many instances, through the body: we try to make ourselves over to match impossible standards, while this process represents itself as externalizing an inner authenticity both utterly typical Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2007 ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/07/010017-32 q 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680770601103670 18 CRESSIDA J. HEYES and entirely our own. Thus while of course many cosmetic surgery recipients want to become (more) attractive, many (both qualitative research and popular representations suggest) want to better embody the kind of person they believe themselves, characterologically speaking, to be. This connection between the inner character and the outer body in contemporary culture marks a strange (but by no means novel) confluence of the language of morality and the practice of transforming the flesh. Many thinkers from Plato to Rousseau to Hegel have suggested in various ways that the body tells us something about the virtues of the soul with which it is conjoined, while one need only think of phrenology, physiognomy, or the moralizing frenzy surrounding obesity today to see that the project of reading identity from the body’s surface and size has both historical and enduring popularity.2 There are, of course, contemporary political movements that aim to debunk this connection: feminists, anti-racists, and disability rights activists, for example, have all convincingly argued that bodies marked by sex, race, or physical impairment do not indicate an inferior intellectual ability or moral character.3 Yet despite the rationality of the age, we seem more than ever to act as if (even though we may not believe that) one’s outer form reflects one’s virtues: the ever more minutely detailed visual objectification of (especially female) bodies, the extraordinary popularity of diet and exercise regimens, the plethora of beauty products, and, finally, the explosive growth of cosmetic surgery, all indicate that how we look has become more, not less, important to how we understand ourselves.4 Improved appearance clearly has, both historically and now, a complex psychic resonance and cultural symbolism that cosmetic surgery has cultivated while also seeking to redress. The sub-specialty bears a peculiar burden of justification unlike other areas of medicine, since cutting into a healthy body that falls within a perceived normal range for its time and place (admittedly a fuzzy criterion) needs further rationalization. Paradigmatically resonant contemporary defenses of cosmetic surgery thus draw attention to the psychological suffering caused by a sense of mismatch between the inner character and the outer form. Being someone who is a good person—a construction especially important perhaps to the contemporary American psyche—must be represented by a concomitantly attractive body. Instead of working only to conform to norms of beauty, we are now told, cosmetic surgery is a way of working on the self that enables greater authenticity, helps people to overcome past trauma, improves relationships, and sows the seeds of a better character. Understanding how normalization produces its subjects in scripted popular representations will help feminists theorize the doubled oppressive and enabling functions of cosmetic surgery for its now more typical non-celebrity recipients, at the same time as we work to understand why cosmetic surgery makes promises about permanent and conclusively satisfying self-transformation that cannot be kept. Foucault and Normalization In much feminist philosophical writing that takes itself to be Foucauldian in spirit the verb “to normalize” and its cognates are used with relatively little theoretical precision, to imply any process through which homogeneity and conformity are enforced or encouraged. For Foucault, however, normalization is a more complex concept. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault ([1975] 1979) makes his well known argument that sovereign power— in which a specific authority has defined rule over others—is increasingly superceded in the latter half of the eighteenth century and beyond by disciplinary power—in which COSMETIC SURGERY AND THE TELEVISUAL MAKEOVER 19 techniques of management that cannot be attributed to any particular individual are used to classify and control populations. This new mechanics of power operated on the individual body to manipulate its movements and gestures, with an eye to shaping their overall economy rather than merely their signification. “These methods,” Foucault argues, “which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called ‘disciplines’” (Foucault [1975] 1979, p. 137). Disciplines thus have a double, paradoxical effect: they increase efficiency in their institutional contexts as well as making individual bodies more adept, while at the same time they provide a mechanism for the intensification of power relations. In other words, the very body that develops new capacities and skills also becomes the highly scrutinized subject of the minutest forms of manipulation (Foucault [1975] 1979, p. 138). It becomes what Foucault famously called a “docile body.” Crucially for my purposes, disciplinary power is itself invisible yet renders its subjects hyper-visible in order to tighten its grip: “it is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (Foucault [1975] 1979, p. 187). The display of power, Foucault argues, thus moves from overt expression of potency (in which the apparatus of power must be made visible) to the ceremonial presentation of subjects, in which power is only a gaze (Foucault [1975] 1979, pp. 187–188). For example, in the visual economy of cosmetic surgery, we can watch the physician’s examinations of prospective patients on TV. As the surgeon draws whorls and lines on his patient’s skin in thick black marker, to show where he will cut into her flesh later in the operating room, she is left in plastic cap and surgical gown as a visible (and slightly ridiculous) object of his analysis of her body’s flaws. His scalpels and instruments and his framed diplomas are also important to his power, but it is through the body of the patient that he literally renders his disciplinary gaze visible. Normalizing judgment, a central feature of disciplinary power, was enacted through the micro-management of behavior in areas of social life from which penality had previously been absent. “Through this micro-economy of a perpetual penality operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value” (Foucault [1975] 1979, p. 181). This process of creating distributions with internally defined systems of meaning generates hierarchy and a set of punishments and rewards that can be used to manipulate individuals to ensure greater homogeneity. Thus: The art of punishing, in the regime of disciplinary power ... brings five quite distinct operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the “nature” of individuals. It introduces, through this “value-giving” measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences. (Michel Foucault [1975] 1979, pp.

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